any claim for Poe on the ground of
the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We may hope,
however, some day to regain the use of our ears, and to discover once
more that music and metre are utterly distinct arts. When that
re-discovery has been made, Poe will resume his position as one of the
most uniformly melodious of all those who have used the English
language.

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection of his prosody
have occasionally objected that in the most popular examples of it, "The
Raven" and "The Bells," he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be
objected, with equal force, that Victor Hugo in "Les Djinns" and even
Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" made use of "tricks." On the other hand,
if the charge be deserved, it seems odd that in the course of nearly
seventy years no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the
wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what must be judged
definite errors against taste in detail--Poe's taste was never very
sure--but the skill of the long voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal
intervals by the croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation,
as if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of the bells,
is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in keeping with the
personal genius of the writer, that it is surely affectation to deny its
value.

It is not, however, in "The Bells" or in "The Raven," marvellous as are
these _tours de force_, that we see the essential greatness of Poe
revealed. The best of his poems are those in which he deals less
boisterously with the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of
his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a technical
point of view, must be regarded not only as the most interesting, which
he wrote, but as those which have had the most permanent effect upon
subsequent literature, not in England merely, but in France. These are
"Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," "For Annie." One of Poe's greatest inventions
was the liquidation of stanzaic form, by which he was able to mould it
to the movements of emotion without losing its essential structure. Many
poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to do it with the
stanza. In the three latest lyrics this stanzaic legerdemain is
practised with an enchanting lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and
elastic grace. Perhaps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest
revision, "For Annie" would have been the mos